Anjum Hasan, Thoughts to Words

The stories we read and love leave an indelible mark on us. The soul of the book, it’s author forms a relationship with us. This nameless relationship between the reader and author continues where the latter promises to write more and the former promises to read more. Anjum and I have been in this anonymous relationship for some time. 

Anjum Hasan is a novelist, short story writer, poet, and also the editor of prestigious magazine Caravan. Born in Shillong, she lives in Bangalore and Coorg.  Always in search of good Indian authors especially women, and proponents of local fiction and short stories, Anjum’s books were a great find. Her books - A difficult pleasure, Neti Neti and the latest A day in the life, have been a pleasure to read and review (here).

Her short story collections reaffirm my faith in the innate power of short fiction. Every time I read her books I imagined having deep conversations about the vibrant, multi faceted worlds and the characters she created. As she says - What form would thoughts take if we didn’t allow them words?

Thankfully my alter ego, Storywala allows me to take this relationship and my thoughts to words. Storywala approached her for an interview and she kindly agreed. She has many interviews online and her literary career and achievements are deeply inspiring. To prepare for the interview, I spoke to my book club and creative writing friends to reflect on what they would like to know about her. We all agreed we wanted to know Anjum ‘The storyteller’. 

Dear Anjum, 🙏🏼 thank you for being part of the Storywala and sharing a glimpse of yourself and your storyteller soul. 

o What makes you write? What is that inherent force in you that drives you to tell tales?

 

I remember Margaret Atwood in her book about why one writes, Negotiating with the Dead, had made a collage several pages long of the responses she got to that question when she did a survey. Strangely I don’t remember any of the answers themselves except – to show the bastards. Orhan Pamuk says writing is not about narrating the world but seeing the world through words. I think for me it is a bit of both – the urge to narrate and the urge to describe in language.

 

o Tell us about the first story you ever wrote? At what age and what inspired you? 

 

I think it was a puerile fantasy inspired by The Hobbit written for a Swami Vivekananda Short Story competition when I was eight or nine. The RK Mission was a cultural force in the town where I grew up, meaning they were always putting up these competitions to stir things up for young people. But I didn’t really know how to tell a story – that is, I couldn’t make things up and other children around me, my elder brother for instance, seemed to be born with the knack.

 

o Is there anyone who has influenced your writing? Some one who mentored or encouraged you.

 

How else can one write except through a lifetime of being influenced? It’s just a question of who – which writer, which sympathetic reader – comes into your life at which point and decides each subsequent direction. That’s all that’s needed – the openness to influence. I’ve just read Girish Karnad’s marvellous memoir, This Life at Play, which is in some ways an account of the art that influenced his art. As well as the life of course. But the point is that one is the sum of one’s influences though one doesn’t always acknowledge them.

 

o What is your process of writing a story? 

 

It’s usually built around a central image or a passing idea, I don’t have a thesis to flog. In the story “Yellow Rose”, for instance, from A Day in the Life, the image was of people who don’t leave their houses, middle class urban people who find physical Indian reality painful to deal with and have retreated. Or in “I am Very Angry” from the same book the theme was sudden rage, again a very contemporary, a very city thing. A restaurant owner being killed for not serving extra chutney to his customer or someone killed for, literally, stepping on someone’s toes during a procession. Urban madness that the newspapers report in the dead pan, or dead, really, idiom that cries out for a story.

 

o An authors writing is a lot about their personality, memories, and experiences. Is there a story where you felt you had to bare your soul, and how did you come to deal with it? 

 

One is always baring one’s soul incrementally so as to save some of it for the next thing. I am not wholly convinced by all the many recent tell-all, soul-baring memoirs or autobiographical fiction. They might have therapeutic value for the writer and even for the reader but they seem to also exhaust the trauma. But I don’t know if the trauma is ever exhausted. I’m all for sublimation not that I always succeed at it.

 

o Your child characters are poignantly depicted. Do you have a vivid memory of your own childhood? What was it like? 

 

Deeply boring. And one used every single imaginative resource to fend off that boredom. It’s hard to recreate the exact feeling of what it was like to be a child in the 1980s but the other day it came to me for a moment, a sudden vacancy and how anything, even catastrophe, definitely catastrophe, would be interesting in comparison to that. And now we live with catastrophe so we brought it on ourselves, the curse of interesting times.

 

o No one accepts it but it’s a given fact that every parent has a favourite child. Which one of your books is your favorite and why? 

 

I’m just editing a novel called History’s Angel which I think I am reasonably happy with, or hope to be after the revise. I don’t know if I’ll change my mind after it’s published. One’s relationship with the printed book tends to be different from a work in progress.

 

p.s we can’t wait for it 🤓

o Your romance with Bangalore is evident. If you had to write on another city which one would it be.

 

 I’ve written about Shillong as well in Lunatic in my Head and Neti, Neti and in some of my stories, and am currently working on a non-fiction book on Shillong.

 

o Which is your favourite book? (Difficult choice so let’s assume you are at gun point)

 

For a long time it was Madame Bovary. I even wrote about the novel in a novel of my own, Neti, Neti.

 

o Who is your favourite author (s)? (Remember the gun) 

 

Nabokov has been a favourite writer, especially when I began writing my fiction. That fabulous energy and inventiveness of language. I really delved into the older Russian writers later and they have so much to teach still. I am reading Brothers Karamazov properly for the first time just now.  

 

o Tell us about your personal library at home? (Share a picture pls)

 

It seems equally divided between poetry, fiction and books on writing and literature. My husband’s collection has a lot more history and travel literature.

 

o Finally, an advise for aspiring writers? 

 

I am repeating advice I have given before – to read, read, read.

Thank you Anjum. Sending you loads of love and best wishes as I pick up the copy of Lunatic in my Head (rightly titled for my current mental state) as my next read. 😍🥰 looking fwd to my next adventure with Anjum.